Best of Business Tools

In the quest to turn out this year's most innovative software and security solutions, some 380 vendors ramped up their wares in four separate categories. And when the coding and development was done, five players stood alone at the top of the 2006 VARBusiness Technology Innovators Awards.

The winners ranged from stalwart developers to smaller niche players, and this year's product cavalcade ran from point upgrades

to debut products. But what all of the software players brought to the table this year was a strong sense of business purpose and a collection of products that favored real ROI over bells and whistles.

VARs have been saying for years that their primary desires for software and security innovation have revolved around price, ease of use and addressing their customers' business needs. This year, the winners for Enterprise & Small Business Software, Application Infrastructure and Security are clearly a cadre that got the message.

So tight was this year's competition that in the largest software division, Enterprise Software, VARBusiness judges deadlocked. Business Objects and Sage Software tied for first place.

For Business Objects' XI Release 2, the award was the result of some seriously increased firepower for this business-intelligence player. In the latest release, made generally available last November, one key addition is so-called "Intelligent Question" technology, which let users unaccustomed to BI software unlock secrets hidden in their corporate data. With the IQ features, users can simply ask straight business questions such as, "Who are my top customers?" and, "What products did they buy?"

The software not only makes BI simple, it adds power in the form of updated tools for data quality/integration, reporting with Crystal Reports, advanced query and analysis capabilities, and bolstered dashboard and performance-management tools.

For co-winner Sage Software, the latest release of Sage CRM SalesLogix boasts architecture-performance upgrades that expand list-management functionality, as well as enhanced .Net server technology. That enables thin-client deployment of the SalesLogix Web interface without requiring additional software downloads.

According to Sage officials, users can now load and work with lists of thousands of customer records within seconds. Additionally, the new Web architecture in Sage CRM SalesLogix, also released last November, supports five times more users with less memory, a marked improvement in the use of customers' servers.

"We have clients who can now search and retrieve lists of over 500,000 customer records in a matter of seconds," says Eli Szklanka, managing partner of GuideMark, a Sage CRM Solutions business partner. "This type of performance is unique and will provide our clients with significant productivity improvements."

NEXT: Software for SMBs, creative uses of existing tech and more.